Top typo-squatted sites target children, some with porn

The act of typo-squatting has increased and continues to make money off of …

Type in "unitrd.com" into your browser's address bar—oops, missed that "e"—and you won't find a site for United Airlines. Instead, you'll be directed to a landing page with lots of links on how to get cheap flights, credit card apps, and a plethora of other links. This typo-squatting episode is familiar to millions of web users, although the results aren't always so cleanly-formatted and porn-free. Unfortunately, the trend of typo-squatting is growing, and, according to security research company McAfee, squatters are increasingly targeting gamers, online shoppers, dating sites, and even children.

McAfee's findings came as part of its yearly study on typo-squatting trends, entitled "What's In A Name: The State of Typo-Squatting 2007." The company collected a list of popular web sites from Hitwise, Yahoo, Nielsen, Billboard, Google, the company's own popularity data, and other staff suggestions. It then generated 2,771 target sites to swap, replace, insert, or delete characters in order to find squatters. Each five to 10-letter domain generated between 500 and 800 permutations each, leading McAfee to ultimately analyze over 1.9 million domains.

Most alarmingly, McAfee found that sites targeted at kids were among the most targeted by squatters as well. 24 of the top most squatted sites mimic web sites for children 12 and under, says the company. When you add in sites like MySpace, however, that number gets bumped up to 60 of the top most squatted sites. Not only could this lead to scams and malware after a few errant clicks, it could also lead to porn in some cases. McAfee says that porn on non-adult typo-squatted sites is only 2.4 percent—lower than previous years. Still, a number of domains mimicking children's sites direct users to adult content, including variations of sites like indianchild.com and americangirl.com.

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Aside from children, though, gaming sites sit at the top of the top 10 list of targets for typo-squatters, closely followed by airlines, mainstream media, adult content, tech, auto, security, music, and shopping. As to why squatters register these domains and throw pages up, the motivation is pretty clear—if they run ads on the page, they can easily capitalize on your casual typo. Almost 20 percent of suspected typo-squatted sites contain ads, according to McAfee, which have the potential to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

As to what could be driving the increase in typo-squatting, McAfee cites the World Intellectual Property Organization in saying that an increase in top-level domains means more virtual real estate for squatters. Automated registration tools help too, as does the expansion of WHOIS privacy services. Another factor is domain name "tasting," which involves registering a domain for a five-day grace period to see what kind of traffic it can pull in. If there's enough traffic, a squatter will then throw a page up (complete with ads) in order to capitalize on it.

As usual, users can protect themselves from being scammed by being extra-careful about typing. But everyone makes mistakes, so just be sure to avoid clicking on anything if you find yourself on an obviously squatted site. McAfee also advertises its SiteAdvisor tool (compatible with a number of browsers) that displays a yellow warning for sites that trigger its typo-squatting criteria. Somehow, we get the feeling that this report's timing wasn't coincidental.